I am very happy to have the tools of RC, to be part of this big Community of people who are fighting for a better world from a base of connection and liberation, and to have the internal resource to push hard for what I think is right. I can do what I do because of my years of sessions and RC leadership and the collective backing and intelligence of the RC Community. I do feel discouraged and scared at times, but I know to have a session and not back away from my challenges. I want everyone to have as much of their mind and will as I have had the chance to have. And for that to happen, we need to teach RC to a lot more people.
We are in the middle of a global climate emergency, within a collapsing society. The society is collapsing because its social and economic institutions are built on false distress-based ideas—ideas that support profit making at the expense of people and the earth, sanction oppressions that dehumanize and exploit people, cause poverty and increasing income disparities, and depend on ever-continuing economic consumption. Our society, based on this foundation, can no longer sustain itself. And climate change is fueling a more rapid collapse as it destroys communities and reveals the exploitation that is driving the climate emergency and so many other social problems.
More and more of us are realizing that we are not heading into the future we expected even a decade ago, that we are moving into more difficult times for everyone. And we are trying to use these times to awaken huge numbers of people and engage them in working for transformative change. To prevent catastrophic warming, the expanding global climate movement will have to shut down our fossil-fuel-based economies, and that will require and cause huge changes in our societies.
Many of us RCers are addressing the climate emergency in the context of ending oppression and exploitation. We are taking RC into wide world movements, especially the climate movement, and people are noticing us. They are responding to the many ways we are introducing the radical idea of people listening attentively to each other. They are responding to the ways we are helping them unload feelings brought up by global crises and the ways people are coming together to set things right. They are realizing that to function well in these times requires being emotionally healthy. And as a result, they are asking us to teach them more about listening and our understandings about oppression.
We have been working toward the goal of being asked to teach large numbers of people RC. We have created our going-public projects—United to End Racism, No Limits for Women, Sustaining All Life, and Jews and Gentiles United to End Anti-Semitism—to open the doors to RC to more people. In these projects we present RC in the context of issues, like oppression and climate change, that people care deeply about, and this allows more people to consider our ideas and practices.
To meet the growing interest, we can use many more of us taking RC into the world and teaching it. We can use you. If you are not yet doing this, consider that you are the right person to be doing it, have your sessions on it, and try it!
After people attend our events and show an interest, we want to be able to offer them a next step they can take toward making RC their own. What is possible depends on their resource, and the RC resource around them, but also on someone they can learn from. Could it be you?
If you are a certified RC teacher, please consider making places for new faces in your class. If you don’t have a class now, consider starting one. If you are an experienced Co-Counselor but are not yet certified to teach, ask your Reference Person what you need to do to be certified. If teaching a class doesn’t make sense for you, who could you teach one to one?
As more and more of us share RC more widely, we can think and discharge about how to make RC more relevant to the people who are coming to us in this time of collapse. We want RC teachers to understand the issues people are facing, to not be isolated from the social movements of our times, and to be thinking well about People of the Global Majority, young people, Native people, and working-class and poor people. We want to provide a good home in our Communities for these people, increase their numbers in our Communities, and increasingly be led by them.